The Hothouse by the East River (7 page)

Peregrine
sips his drink and then turns the glass this way and that, as if he too feels
that all this palaver has occurred many times before, many times, like the new
spring today blowing in on Manhattan from Long Island Sound, making the dust
dance on the pavements.

‘About
this show that Pierre and I are planning to put on at the Very Much Club,’ he
says, ‘we don’t have a lot of time to get started if we want the spring
audiences; May, June at the latest. But we can’t fail, Mr Hazlett, that’s for
sure. It’s right for the spring.’

But
Paul is still in the compound of Intelligence buildings in the spring of 1944.
He is twenty-eight. Paul has been back and forward to England since his late
school-days, having been sent from Montenegro to his father’s English
relatives. He studied in Paris, then London. ‘His intellect has a hundred
eyes,’ his mother wrote to her friends. In fact he has made his way quite well,
starting on foreign broadcasts for the B.B.C. Then, since it had come round to
wartime, he was sent to the Compound, a secret government department which
specialised in propaganda broadcasts to Europe.

‘I’m
not ambitious,’ he says to Elsa when he has fallen in love with her. ‘Not an
ambitious man at all.’ He says this in self-commendation; what he really means
is that he is afraid he will not be successful in achieving any ambitions. She
is not interested one way or another in his ambitions, being attracted to him
in any case more and more, day after day. If he should say he is ambitious for
anything whatsoever the word would not mean anything to her. She is
twenty-three, and at this time does not cast a shadow at the least angle
different from anybody else’s within her range of visible light; sunlight and
artificial light act on Elsa as they do on everyone else.

The
norm in the air about Elsa and Paul is the war with Germany.

At
times, when she is not on late duty, Elsa takes the German prisoners for walks
in the country within a five-mile radius of the Compound. For various reasons
these men, having been taken prisoners of war, have chosen to leave their camps
and work for their enemy. What they are engaged with in this particular
Compound is known as black propaganda and psychological warfare. This is the
propagation of the Allied point of view under the guise of the German point of
view; it involves a tangled mixture of damaging lies, flattering and plausible
truths.

‘I
think you’re out of your element,’ says Miles Bunting to Elsa. He is a lanky
man with a twisted smile, reputed to be the most intelligent member of the
Compound. The Compound is reputed to be the most intelligent outfit of the war.
The source from which these reputations have arisen will never be found.

‘I
think you’re out of your mind,’ she says.

‘Our
war effort here is extremely valuable,’ he says.

‘Valuable
to yourselves,’ says she.

‘No, to
the country,’ he says. And he adds, ‘We have means of testing the results.
These are things you don’t know a thing about.’

She has
said the place is ridiculous. Deep in the heart of it, she is nevertheless
deprived of any insight into its doing. It is the policy of the little
organisation to tell the workers only what they need to know to perform their
individual functions.

Miles
Bunting says again, ‘You’re out of your element.’

‘And
you, your mind,’ she says.

It is
true she is out of her element; for one thing she is the only member of the
Compound who does not know German. And in a sense it is true he is out of his
mind for indulging a desire to confide in her, with hints and references to
which she cannot possibly attach a meaning, as if she were a member of the
inner circle at the Compound. He had simply overlooked her limited knowledge,
drawn by her extreme attractiveness.

Among
the women in the house where she is billeted is large Princess Xavier who has
already met Paul in London. ‘Poppy,’ says Elsa, ‘would you marry Paul if you
were me?’

‘I’m
not ambitious,’ Paul says to Elsa when he has fallen in love with her. ‘Not
ambitious at all.’

He
takes Elsa to London on their fortnightly leave, which they arrange to
coincide. They have stayed first at a borrowed flat in Clarges Street, then at
the Strand Palace Hotel which is less comfortable since they have to produce
their identification cards and ration books, each bearing different names, so
that they are obliged to creep in and out of one or the other single rooms
early in the morning, and to tip the floor-page heavily.

Elsa’s
main job at the Compound consists of taking messages and reports from military
intelligence personnel on a special green telephone used everywhere during the
war for secret communications. It is known as a scrambler, because the connection
is heavily jammed with jangling caterwauls to protect the conversation against
eavesdropping; this harrowing noise all but prevents the speakers from hearing
each other, but once the knack is mastered it is easy to hear the voice at the
other end giving such information as flight details from newly-returned bomber
missions, the numbers sent, the numbers lost, the numbers of enemy planes
felled. Numbers and numbers over Germany and France. Cities and factories. Pinpoints
and numbers piercing the scrambler.

And
sometimes in the afternoons she takes the Germans for walks within the five-mile
radius of the Compound that is allowed to them. Perhaps it is because she
speaks no German that these men tend to say more to her in English than they
would do in their own language. It is a common misunderstanding that one who
does not know another’s mother tongue is assumed to be less intelligent and
discerning than he is. In this way, most of the handful of the German
prisoners whom Elsa takes for country walks underestimate her wits.

Besides
which, they are mostly edgy; whatever the degree of conviction that has led
them to work for the enemy, there remains a nagging knowledge that they have
deserted their native forces. Only two amongst them are entirely at ease with
themselves: a young dedicated communist and an Austrian count.

And so,
before Paul arrives at the Compound and about the time that Miles Bunting is
starting loftily to put her at odds, she occupies her bored afternoons by
taking them for walks, one by one.

They
are walking along the edge of a wood. Rudi is a flat-faced man in his early
twenties. He walks with a curious wading motion, with Elsa by his side keeping
solemn time while blankly noting him within herself, placing him on record with
her indwelling dæmon. He is gloomy today. The men he is billeted with, the
other prisoners of war, who are working for the British, are getting on his
nerves. He says they had a fight the night before; it all started with one
accusing another of leaving a rim round the edge of the bath. He says that
anyhow, he is sure to be shot before long. D-Day is coming up, he says. And he
waves his hands towards the thick woods to their left and tells her that
Hitler’s parachutists will soon be filling these woods. He speaks with a sort
of bitter, convinced pride like a Judas foretelling hell-fires awaiting him as
a boastful proof of his betrayed master’s divinity. Elsa tells him to cheer
up. She reminds him that only last week he was bubbling with joy to think that
the war would soon be over, and he could go down to the beach with his friends
at home as he had done before. But he wades on gazing down at the path,
depressed. ‘My family will find that I’ve been working for the British. Here,
we have lard to eat. They have no lard in Germany today. They will say I have
done it for lard. They will never have me back.’ She says, ‘Oh, you’re very
erratic.’

‘Erotic?’
He brightens with the word, smiling towards her.
‘Erratic,’
she repeats.
He stops and takes his little dictionary from the inside pocket of his saggy
tweed jacket and gravely looks up the word.

They are
walking along the edge of the wood. This time it is another of the band, Heinz
the communist, small and tough, the survivor of a captured U-boat who shakes
hands with himself continually for his decision to work against Hitler and who
looks with breezy energy to the inevitable defeat of Germany when he hopes to
take up his peacetime job as a waiter in London instead of Hamburg. Heinz the
communist and Erich the count are her favourite walking-partners. Some
afternoons they walk all three together. The two men practise their English on
Elsa. The path by the edge of the wood is narrow, for the fields have been
furrowed right to the verge because of the wartime need for crops to grow on as
many lengths and patches of earth as possible.

They
walk through the woods now, these three, talking of their past as if they were
middle-aged and not all in their young twenties. The war has given them a past.
It will never be the same afterwards. They none of them want it so. Heinz
speaks cheerfully of his boyhood in the cold alleys of Berlin. Erich glimpses a
rabbit before it bobs into its hole. ‘If I had a gun I would have shot him for
supper,’ he says. ‘As a boy I shot rabbits.’

‘I
stole rabbits,’ says Heinz, and goes on to recount, in English that becomes
more curiously constructed as his story develops, how adept he was as a boy at
slipping dead rabbits off their hooks, where they hung at the doors of big
butchers’ shops, then bearing them to an alley butcher’s where he obtained a
very small but precious price for them. So they talk of their past, Heinz with
his alley-wits in the hungry back streets, his gang battles with the Hitler
Youth and his training as a radio operator in the navy in the early days of the
war, gives out his past in a series of pictures, distinct, primitive,
undisdainful, without hope, without pain, without any comment but the grin and
laugh of a constitutional survivor, who has, and always will have, plans for
the future.

Erich,
whose home is a castle among the mountains of Southern Austria, now occupied
by the military, does not seem to care much that it once contained his past
life. This past of his still clings about his young personality in bits, as
late leaves droop singly from a winter tree; he has shaken off most of it. He
was married shortly before the war. It was not a love match. ‘But,’ he has once
said, ‘if I find they have killed my wife I shall of course shoot myself.’ He
trudges through the woods with Heinz and Elsa, identifying birds by their
calls, naming ferns, examining burrows in the earth and catkins on the trees,
about all of which he is explicitly knowledgeable. They trudge through last
year’s leaves under the spring foliage and speculate as everyone else is doing
about the forthcoming D-Day, whether the Allies will attack from North Africa,
from Norway, or from the Channel. Elsa, too, has brought her past life with her
and shares it as casually as she shares the sandwiches of bread, margarine and
bits of cold bacon whenever she can scrape these items together from her allotted
rations. She brings with her scraps of her life in a family of poor relations
in a semi-detached house in Sevenoaks, a tumble-down education at a boarding
school where she played lacrosse and the piano. The three laugh often, for they
think of things to laugh about and offer them round, one by one, until it is
time to return to the village and wait for the official bus at four o’clock
which will carry them to the Compound for their work. The villagers stare at
them with contempt, not knowing in the least what is going on, but knowing only
that their countryside is peppered with Germans and that somehow the
authorities permit it.

Only
once Elsa and one of her German companions are arrested. A policeman new to
these parts hears the foreign accent and demands their identity cards; he is
not in the least satisfied. Elsa and her German quietly accept his invitation
to the police station. It is a still, sunny afternoon. The sergeant on duty is
vaguely aware that foreigners are locally engaged on secret work, but he is
taking no chances. Elsa gives a telephone number and the sergeant disappears.
She sits quietly with her companion, a middle-aged philosopher from Dresden.
They sit for a while under the eyes of the policeman who has brought them in.
Then the German starts to protest. He is indignant. His nerves have had enough
of policemen, and he has not taken the step of joining with the British in
order to find himself once more in the hands of any police whatsoever. ‘It’s
all right,’ Elsa keeps saying. ‘Don’t worry.’ The sergeant returns, this time
rather embarrassed but still not disposed to commit himself to an apology. The
young policeman stands guard by the door while the sergeant goes behind a
counter and starts writing in a ledger-like book with raised eyebrows to
betoken nonchalance. ‘To be treated like a pissing schoolboy!’ says the German
professor. The sergeant writes on, the policeman stands on, and Elsa continues
to reassure her companion: ‘They’ll come and rescue us in a minute or two.’
The security officer at the Compound turns up by car within twenty minutes,
accompanied by the Chief Constable of the County, formally recognises Elsa and
the prisoner, and whizzes them off in the car while the sergeant is still
saying, ‘We can’t take any chances you know.’ The security officer mutters all
the way to the Compound about what a raspberry the police are going to get
because of this, a raspberry in these days being already an outdated
expression meaning a reprimand. A man less set in his limited ways than the
security officer would call it a rocket in this English spring of 1944 when
rocket missiles are leaping on London and the word is one of such that you either
have to bandy it about as a euphemism or sit down, weep and give up.